Preparation

Drain the juice from the black, pinto, and kidney beans. Mix them up with the vegetarian beans in a foil drip pan.

Chop up the bacon and fry it until done. Spoon onto a paper towel to drain.

Drain most of the grease, retaining at least 2-4 tbs. Chop the onion up small, and fry in the bacon grease until well-cooked.

Add the drained bacon, sauteed onions, and the rest of the ingredients to the beans. Stir well.

Place on the lower BBQ smoker grill. Be sure and center it below where your drip meat will be cooking.

Put your other items on the BBQ smoker and let cook until the meat is done.

I typically run the BBQ smoker between 215°F and 250°F (depending on what I am cooking); at these temperatures the beans will happily cook away without a lot of attention. If you are cooking something that requires higher smoking temperatures you’ll want to keep a closer eye on these to make sure they don’t boil away. Here’s what this batch looked like when they were done:

One of the tricks we learned when making a batch with the brisket is that 3 hours is generally more than enough to get great results, but anything longer than that will get too greasy and you’ll end up having to drain off a lot of fat.
These can also be cooked in a much shorter time; generally anything over an hour will yield a batch of beans that will get your friends talking